Thursday, November 15, 2012

Jibe 1.5 and Unity 4

Over the past months we've been busy working on several development projects for clients, and in each project we have had the chance to expand on our Jibe platform. The upcoming release of Jibe 1.5 will incorporate many of the features we have developed, and we will be ensuring that the release will be 100% compatible with the newly released Unity 4 editor.

Animations can have any name, and are mapped to known animation states via a simple script set up in the Inspector (makes it much easier to grab animations from places like the Mixamo store to add simple gestures to your avatars)

Appearance maps can support model, hair and outfit choices out of the box, the goal is to move towards a more extensible system

Storage and retrieval of avatar dressing choices for Jibe Mars customers for future implementation of immediate login of pre-dressed avatars.

Improved tracking of Account UUID (Unique Identifier for a logged in user) for use within websites where tracking by known ID is important. This feature enables both understanding of the current ID of the player from the multiplayer server perspective and from a user-maintained system.

100% C# codebase with final scripts converted from Javascript.

Updated Jibe manual with full information on each of the new features in the platform!

We've also updated our Jibe Web Suite for our hosted and behind firewall server customers to include a rich administration site and support for groups and role based permissions to give you more control over access to your Jibe worlds. We're rolling this out to all our existing clients (it is compatible with 1.4.2 as well as 1.5) - let us know if you would like to apply for a priority upgrade by dropping us a note to our ticket system at http://metaverseheroes.com

Jibe 1.5 will be coming out as soon as we finish our QA testing. In the meantime, customers who are eager to try out Unity 4 should do so with caution until we can isolate any potential issues with the new editor and have approved the use and support of the new editor, and any issues that the pioneers of you may find please contribute your findings to our Jibe-Unity Google Group! If there are any significant issues with Jibe 1.4.2 and Unity 4 we will provide updated project kits to customers as soon as we can.